


when i'm pipe and slippers and rocking chair

by nightwideopen



Category: BBC Radio 1 RPF, One Direction (Band)
Genre: Anxiety, Banter, Canon Compliant, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, M/M, Marriage Proposal, No Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 03:00:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13627185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwideopen/pseuds/nightwideopen
Summary: If there’s anything that Nick has learned from being with Louis is that his mind is a bit of a coin toss.





	when i'm pipe and slippers and rocking chair

**Author's Note:**

> hi i love nick and louis and established relationship fluff but i hate proposals. im really only good at writing short fics so i was excited for this exchange and then found it incredibly hard to settle on something haha
> 
> title from love is a lazerquest by arctic monkeys

If there’s anything that Nick has learned from being with Louis is that his mind is a bit of a coin toss. You’re either one hundred percent correct about his habits and tendencies, what he might say or like, or you could be completely wrong. There’s no such thing as most-of-the-time or some-of-the-time with Louis. It’s all or nothing. And every day Nick plays along with the little guessing game he’s created for himself. Half the time he wins his personal bets and treats himself to something nice. The other half of the time, well, he can’t punish himself for not being omniscient.

It’s days like today when Nick is certain he’s going to get almost everything correct. He comes home from the BBC to find Louis sprawled out on the couch, using Clifford as a pillow and Pig and Stinky as a blanket, a cup of tea half drunk and probably cold because he’s fallen asleep watching– ah, yes, a new crime documentary on Netflix. Louis has a certain intrigue for the psychology of killers, something Nick jokingly predicted before he and Louis had ever become something _more_. There’s something about his entire demeanor, his well spoken and fully thought-out interview responses that lend him to seem like someone who wants to get inside other people’s heads. He has extremes like that. The extreme nature of someone’s pathology that leads them to kill? Louis is interested. Nick has an ongoing wager with himself that his interest in psychology has something to do with him trying to figure out what’s going on in his own head. Nick isn’t sure that studying murderers is going to help him much. Unless Louis is hiding a much bigger secret from him. Maybe Louis forcing him to watch _Dexter_ was a hint.

“Could you be any louder, Nick, seriously?” Louis gripes without opening his eyes.

Nick isn’t doing anything but trying to take a sneaky photo of Louis and the dogs, but apparently his thoughts are much too loud for Louis’ liking.

“If you’re a mind reader, you should’ve told me that _before_ you moved in.” Nick moves to sit on the couch, coat and shoes still on. “It’s rude to keep secrets from your flatmate.”

Louis peeks one eye open then, a smile threatening to bare itself at any moment. 

“Think you’re more than just my flatmate but alright,” he acquiesces. “I can’t read your mind, as much as I’d like to. Never know what’s going on inside that giant head of yours.”

There’s something very unsettling about Louis thinking the same thing about Nick as Nick is thinking about Louis. 

Either way, he’s still not entirely convinced that his thoughts aren’t being projected into Louis’ brain. But he can’t stop himself from preemptively picturing Louis shooing the dogs away so he can place his head in Nick’s lap to stare up at him from what Nick is still slightly concerned is a terrible angle. For some reason, it seems to be Louis’ favorite, and after the first forty times, Nick learned to let it go. Sort of. He mostly just realised that Louis wasn’t going to leave him because he looked terrible from _one_ angle. All of his other angles make up for it. It’s just upsetting that Louis doesn’t even _have_ one terrible angle for Nick to take advantage of. Nothing to even the playing field.

“D’you want me to pause that?” He nods towards to telly, becoming unreasonably anxious that Louis has missed nearly five minutes of what he was watching. Not to mention how much he probably missed from sleeping. How is he going to know what’s going on? “Or are you going to start it over.”

Louis shuts his eyes again and burrows the back of his head into Nick’s lap. That means _pet my hair, please, or else I’ll bite your stomach_. Nick learned that the hard way. But he hadn’t thought that Louis would want it right now. He was being prickly and now he’s being soft. The odds aren’t in Nick’s favor today, it seems.

He runs his fingers through Louis’ short hair as best he can. There’s not much to work with anymore and Nick sort of misses it. He figured that Louis might cut his hair again while in LA. He hates his hair getting stuck to the back of his neck. Maybe now that he’s back in London for the rest of winter to prep for the album release he’ll let it grow out. 

“Nah,” Louis says, “It’s not a big deal, just let it play.” He lets out a context little sigh through his nose. “I’ll just catch the next one.”

“Okay.”

It’s really not okay but Nick pretends that it is. He scritches Louis’ scalp a little harder.

Louis smiles.

“D’you want me to start it over so I know what’s going on?”

Nick nods even though Louis can’t see him. “Please.”

Unpredictably, without explanation, Louis understands.

Predictably, Louis sits up and fishes around the pillows for the TV remote. He puts the program all the way back to the beginning, then selects an episode of _The Simpsons_ for background noise. Louis climbs into Nick’s lap, his back to the telly, and plants a horribly wet kiss on Nick’s forehead. Then he invites the dogs back onto the sofa, to which Nick groans. He saw it coming though. Louis likes for them to take up any an all available space around him. 

“Pig hasn’t had a bath yet this week,” Nick whines.

Louis is probably going to ask whose fault that is.

“And whose fault is that?”

It’s Nick’s, of course. But he won’t say so.

“You’ve _literally_ been home all week.”

Louis sighs. “Do I have to explain to you our jobs again?”

When Louis moved in he assigned himself and Nick home duties. He gave Nick the duties of cooking, cleaning, laundry, working to support them, and bathing the dogs– as well as feeding them, walking them, and doing whatever else it is that needed to be done to talk care of Louis and/or the dogs. Louis then proceeded to give himself the duty of looking pretty while cuddling the dogs. And that was the end of it.

Nick doesn’t need to hear them again, but Louis is most likely going to tell him anyway.

“You really don’t–”

“ _Your_ job,” Louis explains loudly, “Is to do all the jobs that I’m too pretty to do. _My_ job is to look pretty.”

Ah, the short version. Nick loves the short version.

Louis grins stupidly, which makes Nick grin stupidly as well.

They both know that Louis helps out around the house as much as he can. It usually ends up in disaster, but it’s always a good laugh, and always very much appreciated.

Louis knocks their foreheads together a little too hard.

“Ouch,” Nick complains.

Louis rolls his eyes. “You love it.”

“No, I love _you_. The pain you put me through is an entirely different story.”

Nick wants Louis to kiss him, but knows he won’t. Louis is being a brat right now, giggling and teasing and being a general pain. It’s quite endearing. It’s easy to read.

Louis buries his face in Nick’s neck, tucking his hands between their chests. He probably feels very safe like this, so Nick wraps his arms around Louis, hands securely holding each side of his thin waist. He’s so _small_ , feeling so fragile in Nick’s hands as though he could just shatter into a million pieces at any given moment. But Nick wouldn’t ever hurt him, not in a billion years. 

Or maybe more than that.

“Nick,” Louis mumbles.

“Yeah?”

“Marry me.”

Nick thinks very briefly that Louis must be joking. He doesn’t sound like he’s joking, and that scares Nick a lot. But Louis has gone very very still in his arms like he hadn’t meant to say it. Nick’s lungs tighten up and he’s halfway to an asthma-slash-panic attack when he realises–

This is the last thing he could’ve predicted Louis doing. 

He shares a private laugh with himself, pays himself his imaginary dues for having lost the day’s wager. 

Nick thinks back to every quiet moment they’ve shared, just like this one. Those moments where he thinks that he doesn’t need anything else, just Louis, the dogs, _The Simpsons_ playing on the telly. He wants this, he wants it so much for the rest of forever and he doesn’t need a grandiose proposal to know that. Nick hates proposals, especially public ones, and he feels kind of bad for making it so known that Louis had to stifle the hopeless romantic in him for this moment. But he’s grateful, and this is all he needs. 

Nick realises that he’s been quiet for a very long moment, and releases his tight grip on Louis so that he can look him in the eye.

“Alright,” he says as casually as Louis had asked. The smile rapidly spreads across his face before he can stop it. “Sounds good.”

Louis lets out a very shaky breath.

“You fucking arsehole.” He swats weakly at Nick’s chest. “Thought you were thinking of how to let me down easy. Never know what’s going on in your _fucking_ head.”

“Could never say no to you, darling. Would you kiss me now?”

Louis rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, I guess.”

He does. And it’s stupidly, horribly, wonderfully, amazingly, terribly, annoyingly perfect. But that’s to be expected. 


End file.
